Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

This wonderful 1980 horse racing classic never loses its luster or charm. Author Bill Barich explores explores the day-to-day internal world of horse racing― from the backside to the backstretch. This entertaining story of the lives and tribulations of various racetrack personalities is sure to extract every human emotion. The author's summer adventure after a family tragedy finds him living the life many diehard racing enthusiasts wish they could. Barich's adventure discovers more than he could ever imagine about something much bigger than racing-life itself.

Genres: Sports, Memoir, Horse Racing, Nonfiction, Horses, Biography, Racing

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bill Barich opens with a painfully personal disclosure. His mother has been diagnosed with cancer. Overwhelmed by his powerlessness, he is suddenly vulnerable to the destructiveness change inevitably leaves in its wake: The random illnesses of other family members, the environmental destruction caused by land developers, the loss of the streams and fishing spots of his youth, incremental shifts in culture and values. He quits his job and moves to the country only to have his marriage falter. Sleep brings nightmares rather than respite.

Desperate to restore structure to his disintegrating world, he flees to a 3rd tier racetrack outside of Oakland. It's a choice suggested by the family's diversion during his mother's illness. Amateurs, they place small bets on the horses, choosing them randomly – an appealing name, a mostly faulty intuition, or just whim. It's touching to hear him describe his mother on these occasions: “[She] would lean forward in her chair, her big reading glasses dwarfing her eyes, making them look childlike, and act excited if her horse were in contention.” (p.4) Is it the adrenaline, or the simple act of being together that momentarily banishes the malaise?

He retreats to a nondescript motel, “The Terrace.” It's a re-enactment of an earlier flight in his youth, from academic study to the romance of the Italian Renaissance by way of a year in Italy. Now, past and present converge in his mind, and his impressions of the track are shaped by the lessons of that historical Firenze. For him, the present with all its chaos parallels the dark ages. “I hated nights at The Terrace. All the television sets came on, seemingly in unison, and the sound of them was unavoidable and rose around me like granite. I felt imprisoned in an aspect of the Middle Ages, some dark and barbarous time. The TV's spoke of cultural decay, of flattened perceptions and a cathodal substratum too insubstantial to support human life. Throughout the state, the spirit was being stripped of its tools for enrichment. Schools, libraries, and museums were closing, and citizens everywhere were retreating into the feudal dimensions of artificial light.” (p.9)

The track's history mirrors any number of historical declines. Once, it was a first-rate park hosting Calumet Farm's equine royalty. Silky Sullivan the beloved west-coast bred champion raced here, as well. Now, in 1978, it's a hard-luck track on the brink of even harder times as attendance continues to decline. What does Barich find in these unpromising environs?

He immerses himself in the study of the Daily Record, seeking to fashion a new, more reliable, structure. He hangs with trainers, grooms, jockeys, agents and bettors both in the backstretch and in the Home Stretch Bar, relishing the quasi-familiarity that seems to have been replaced today by the pallid substitute of online friendships. He comes to understand that the intricate conjured patterns built out of the Daily Record are much less satisfying than the emotional stirring of superstition, and human interaction, and hunches. It follows that a horse named Little Shasta (a name that reminds him of a favorite fishing spot) is, contrary to all the numbers, a winner, and that he fails to place the bet, having put his faith in those numbers. Likewise, when a filly named Pichi finally breaks her maiden, we are cheering with him for Pichi. He's been following her struggles of health and temperament, and listening to the practical wisdom of her trainer, Gary Headley and her groom, Bo Twinn. It doesn't matter that this is the one time he has not bet on Pichi. Reality is the richness of existence. We smell the horses, and hear the grooms mucking out stalls. In such moments, his imagination soars: “I respected grooms like Bo, perhaps disproportionately. They lived the most rigorous and honest lives on the backstretch and seemed to have few illusions than anybody else. Their lives had an ascetic quality, functioning within a matrix of basic demands, work, food, rest, sex, a little occasional excitement, and peace of mind. Often they were highly principled and uncompromising, which led them to social failure. They were suspicious of owners and trainers alike.” (p. 107)

At the same time, he is not unaware of the darkness. Unsound horses are run when they should be rested. Management diverts profits that should have gone into keeping the track conditioned and safe. Drugs are abused and horses cannot even feel their own unsoundness until it is too late. The veterinary staff is there to serve the track, not the horses. Even the most gifted of handlers professes a detachment from the being of the horse. The sole exception is an assistant trainer named Debbie Thomas who cries for 2 hours when the horse she loves, Bushel Ruler, is claimed by another owner.

In the end, however, it is the graceful beauty, and unpredictable feral spirit of the horse that heals Barich. “They wouldn't run to form, no matter how you coaxed them, and in a world increasingly controlled and uniform this was exciting. When you picked a winner, especially at a price, you were buying back a little of your own wildness, cutting a wound into the smothering fabric of domesticity. We were starved, I thought, for contact with an animal other and experienced the lack as a form of sensory deprivation, a diminishment. The corporate fiction into which we'd fallen denied us our passions, and we were hurting because of it.” (p.218)

This is a beautifully written book.

[Kazen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was sold to me as a look behind the scenes at a race course. It is that, but also part memoir and part... deep dive into Renaissance Italy.

I like the character sketches of people at the track - jockeys and grooms, the race announcer and track manager, trainers and owners. The memoir bit was hit and miss, though it started off strong, and while some of the connections to Italian culture were interesting, I did not need an entire chapter detailing his study abroad experience in Florence.

Laughing in the Hills is very much a book of its time with musings about new-fangled digital watches, and casual racism and ableism. It's also quite macho male, which one could expect in the world of thoroughbred racing, but it still shocked me in parts. Barich's wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor, but when they operated they found nothing. He then quit his job and they moved to the country, where he grew restless, so he picked up and moved into a motel by a race course because, manly? Something? His wife is never mentioned again outside of a call from "family", and I couldn't stop thinking of her, in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, unmoored.

And while decently perceptive when it comes to people, he has trouble widening the lens. At one point he muses about why a particular horse got injured and died at the track:

Drug abuse, inadequate supervision of stock, demands of trainers and owners to make a buck, of racing associations to make a bigger buck, the industry's inability to police itself, the pressures of year-round racing, the choice of expediency over nurturance, quantity over quality, I could name twenty-five other contributory factors off the top of my head, but in the end they added up not to an answer but to a familiar syndrome, libraries closing, rivers dammed, condominiums going up, all in the cold blue glow of flickering tubes.

The answer is capitalism. Solved it for you.

All in all there are some good sections, but there's too much filler to call Laughing in the Hills a nonfiction classic.

Content notes: animal death, parental death, mentions of suicide, racism (casual and of its time), ableism (what is now considered a slur for disabled people)

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Laughing in the Hills" was born out of loss, which Bill Barich illustrates at the inception of his 1978 work- "For me it did not begin with horses. They came later, after a phone call and a simple statement of fact: Your mother has cancer."

Lost and full of reprieve, Barich turns to the unlikeliest of cathedrals for inspiration in his time of mourning: the racetrack. The connection as to why or what made him turn to the track is underdeveloped, but this matters little. What does matter is Barich's ability to unveil with an adept and philosophical eye the intricacies and pulse of life at the track.

The track for Barich becomes an insular world where he turns "to get past the sadness." It provides a framework, a construction, within which he can repair the tatters of his grief-filled life, temporarily shattered by the loss and death of his mother. The book arrives at a mystical solution to that pain- it is not until Barich abandons constructions and narratives all together that his own enlightenment becomes possible.

Barich is the consummate Renaissance man, as well versed in the history of thoroughbred horseracing, as philosophy, or the offerings of Florence's Uffizi Gallery. It is wearing these multiple hats of the artist, philosopher, and sportsman that Barich expresses a personal fear that a moral and cultural decay was upon him and his fellow man in the late `70's.

Barich feared that television would emerge out of the '70s as the preferred medium of entertainment; and in so doing, television would become a murderer of culture, creating a time of "flattened perceptions and a cathodal substratum too insubstantial to support human life."

It is out of this fear that Barich turns to art, more particularly writing and other modes of entertainment, rather than television, in a desperate search for his own salvation. But why out of all places did he turn to the racetrack? Why turn to a place popularly believed to be the playground of the ill-repute? "The track, it seemed, was just like life, unjust and aleatory," Barich argues.

In the track, Barich found the ultimate metaphor for life, the quintessential subject for his pen. A framework for his philosophy. The place to play out two parallel journeys.

The narrative thrust of "Laughing in the Hills" is concerned with Barich's evolving relationship with the racetrack (and thus with life) in all its aleatory splendor, his attempts to wrest life's uncertainty under his control, and his ultimate acceptance of the nature of chance.

It is in Barich's ultimate concession to chance that the beauty of the book radiates.

The track is, above all, a home for people. For characters. It is with the acute eye of a seasoned writer that Barich is able to carve out for every person he encounters, from stable groom to bar fly, their rightful claim on the stage of life.

In "Laughing in the Hills" we are introduced to Arnold Walker, a frequenter of The Turf Club and master weaver of tall tales, Richard Labarr, the "racetrack gypsy," John Gibson, the voice of Golden Gate Fields, Headley, the trainer, and many more. Barich, ever the disinterested writer, gives their stories life, realizes their dreams are as real as his own.

In writing about Emery Wienbrenner, "trainer, backstretch bon vivant," Barich speaks of Emery's dream to own a ranch, "He didn't know exactly how the ranch would come to pass, but the vision, as he presented it, was a felt thing, immediately palpable, and when he spoke of it, I could see its dimensions, the split-pine fence and rustic ranch house, and around it snowcapped peaks of granite." Barich renders beautifully both the vulnerability and the coinciding transcendent nature of Weinbrenner's dreams. In lending validity to Emery's dreams, Barich lifts up his own spirits. This act of empathy lends freedom to his pain.

"I don't know why I was spending so much time with Emery," Barich recounts, "what I'd learn from him. The answer was clear, though. We were both struggling; his confusion resembled my own." So it is with all the characters in "Laughing in the Hills". They are companions as well as buoys in Barich's own struggle for meaning.

People are not the only redeemer for Barich. He also finds understanding in horses and the "aleatory" nature in which they compete. Barich compares his love for thoroughbred horses to the love which another character in the book shares for trout fishing, when he describes the man as having "optimism" in his "pursuit of slippery creatures, the desire to connect with forces beyond [his] control."

Barich's love of horses is philosophical. Horse racing he points out is much like time- a human construct that serves a functional purpose. In the case of horse racing, its first purpose is to be enjoyable. But we are reminded at the end of every race that the race itself was ephemeral, a two minute relish. A man-made creation. "I watched him pass the finish line and watched the pattern dissolve," writes Barich of that moment of finality, when the horses stop at varying times at speeds, that moment just beyond when the last sentence of the story has been written, order is again relinquished, and chaos regains its grip on reality.

In "Laughing In The Hills" Barich also details his own attempt to wrestle the myriad of stories, daily races, and Sanskrit-like qualities of "The Daily Racing Form" under his predictive methods.

Barich first took to Golden Gate Fields with a stack of money that he planned to grow across the season during which he was writing his book. But reality refused to conform to his plan. About halfway through the season, Barich switched his approach when his original system proved inadequate. The new system was simply a more leveraged form of his prior one, in that he now just bet less frequently, but with bigger size and longer odds.

Barich's whole foray into the world of gambling serves a narrative and philosophical purpose beyond just elucidating one more aspect of track life. Chaos and order, Barich phrases, is "a shifting notion, a matter of perspective." Gamblers faithfully, and perhaps blindly, impose order on chaos as a way to justify their systems. We lend order to chaos for excitement. We lend order to chaos because we like stories, we like things to end happily, and we want our predictions and insights validated.

But mothers die, and horses that are supposed to win don't, and horses that are unflappable prove duds. Such is life. It is easy to say such things, but we always allow ourselves to believe the opposite. It is human nature. It is why the house always wins. But that is where gambling serves a purpose. It leads, always, to one of two places: bankruptcy or to a refinement of thinking.

Barich realized that his original system would have led him only to bankruptcy, so he tweaked it until he arrived at what he thought was a more infallible one. Had he not done this he would have lost his entire stack. In life, in the absence of unrepeatable luck, it is these countless iterations of refinement that are necessary to make a system able to float; or conversely, to the bettor deciding that he or she should not gamble.

Gambling can lead a gambler, although rarely, to a system so refined that it more than floats, and is able to strip the house of its precious edge. But the ultimate value of the refinement is not in the end itself, but rather the journey, the rethinking, the enlightenment that such a process provides. For Barich, he resolves to cease gambling, with his small, beginning stack almost fifty percent down. But it is a small price to pay for that which he learned along the way about the nature of chance, life, and the wings that would lift him from the weight of his depression.

At the end of the book the parallel journeys become one, the metaphor yet again made explicit, the solution to Barich's pain found:

"I had another bourbon, and thought how thoroughbreds take us away. When I was in touch with them I felt...every neuron in my body, transforming me into a long synapse, bit of energy blowing apart...All connections are tenuous. I knew what was happening then. I was letting go of sadness, letting go of my mother. Living and dying; winning and losing: I sat on the stool...suddenly permeated by all the emotions I had been blocking out. Nothing abides; no cause for alarm."

Barich absorbed all the winning and losing from a season at the track into a personal philosophy on dealing with loss. Barich, by engaging himself back into life and contemplating its aleatory nature, is able to hand over reins of his own life to the Mother Chance, as well as to not fear the results such a concession will bring. Barich demonstrates in "Laughing in the Hills" that if we are able to accept chance's influence on the daily happenings of life (the roll of chance in every horserace), we can be lifted from our pain and taken away to a happier place.

[Ta0paipai · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Laughing At the Hills is, technically speaking, an amazing investigation into racing culture, it failed to hook me as I hoped it would. The book taught me a great deal about a topic I knew next to nothing about. But I never found it fun or gripping reading and had to force myself to see it through to the end. For those reasons I gave it a 3/3.5

[Everett Egginton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A painful start to the novel; indeed, a gripping start--the author coming to terms with, or more accurately attempting to cope with, his mother's recently discovered terminal illness. And how he deals with his impending loss--a season at a race track--is the subject of this 1980 (reprinted in 2015) novel. Barich has written numerous well-acclaimed books and articles (perhaps most notably, several New Yorker short stories) since Laughing in the Hills was first published. Be that as it may, I just finished reading the book for the first time, and I really liked it! The book is, in some ways, timeless. Laughing in the Hills is much more than a novel about horse racing, although Barich clearly knows his subject matter. Indeed it's a novel that touches on history, art, philosophy, and the complexities of life in general.

[Nic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I like my horse racing stories more straight forward than this. I enjoy this quasi-insider view of trainers, grooms, and other racetrack characters, but Barich's rambling style is not my cup of tea. His frequent mentions of ancient philosophers and obscure artists and his digressions on things not related to racing had me skipping pages at a time. I almost gave up on it several times, but finally settled for skimming the last 70 pages. In the end, I just didn't care about what he had to say.

[Sasha Gillespie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to this on audio, which i found challenging and could explain some of my problems. There was very little plot or throughline of characters which made it hard to focus. I really have no idea how the Italy sections relate to the horse racing. Help, so lost.

[Tracy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sorry but I dumped this. It was an audio book maybe I would have been more successful if I'd actually read it myself.

[John Julius · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive book, ground-breaking at the time of its publication, for boldly incorporating memoir into a series of New Yorker feature pieces. I compare Barich's stellar book to another even more impressive book on horse racing, Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf. Check out the full discussion on Youtube: https://youtu.be/cjKv6V960QM

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such an enjoyable series of vignettes. I just took my time with it and enjoyed each section. Put it down and grabbed it again when the moment struck. Brought many thoughts of my father. He would have loved this book. In my mind, I see him with this and the Form at breakfast in Saratoga....... A Sunrise, and (maybe) a coffee before him.

[Brian Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really a 3 1/2 star book — a great read if you are interested in horse racing with a dash of history and philosophy; but, not engaging enough to be a book I’d recommend to the general Goodreads populace.

[Greg D'Avis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes the best books are about subjects that don't interest you. Picked this up after seeing a passing reference somewhere or other, and it's wonderful - lovely and languid and beautifully sad.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book in the 1000 Books to Read... Bought to read at the beginning of horse racing meet. Beautiful prose, insightful and interesting balance of inside racing and philosophy.

[Ncrdusa]

1000 BTR

[Rivers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a good blues, minor key but full of depth. Pair this with Blood Horses by John Jeremiah Sullivan and you'll be on good footing.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I ran across this book in a book about books and decided to give it a chance.

It is a niche book on horse racing at a track near San Francisco.

I enjoyed the "color commentary" and the background information. But overall, I felt sorry for the gamblers, jockeys, and the horses.

[Abigail Pieczynski · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was like one line in this book I enjoyed and the rest was Snooze City - so boring!! However it was in my house and I had nothing else going on so two stars for passing time.

[Joell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazed that I'm just finding this author and particularly, this book. If you aren't hooked in the first paragraph, you might not be human. Humanity is the theme of this book about racing and gambling and the track I loved so dearly. While Barich's take on the horses sometimes seems tragically dim - referring to them numerous times as "nags" he arrives as some beautiful truths and he meets some colorful characters along the way.

I'm partial to his style of writing and of course to his setting. I savored every page. I'm already pouring though another of his books about the California landscape.

[Vel Veeter]

A weird memoir from 1980 that began really strongly for me and despite it being relatively short, lost steam over time. The book begins with our narrator returning home to help care for his mother dying of cancer. While there, feeling some strong chaotic tendencies, he decides to go to the local off track betting parlor and place some bets. And he gets hooked. But this isn’t a book about addiction and spiraling (not really) but a book about the hook of horse racing (we even find out later that his mother also really enjoys betting and its a whole family affair). So the book turns on its heels a little and becomes a book about all aspects of the horse racing industry and art, but not one from a purely racing background or horse ownership or breeding or betting, but a little of each of all these things together in one book. It’s got a nice dilletantish air to the whole thing and involves a little history of Florentine horseracing and breeding dynasties, systems of gambling, and lots of other little things. The parts are more than the whole, though, and that’s often a limiting factor in books like these.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A day at the races, and so much more, whose easy, understated style conceals depths of hidden emotion and insight.

[Shelley VanOverbeke · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a little slow at times. Probably held my interest more than it should have but I realized I know someone in the book.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

aacchh! just "lost" a lengthy review of this book, and i'm too frustrated to rewrite it right now. please check back later for more, I hope. damn this mischievous keyboard!

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A darker-in-tone cousin to the later A Fine Place to Daydream. I prefer the latter's lighter touch, which inspired my first trip to Ireland, to see the Gold Cup.

[Rico Caraco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written with eclectic field of reference. Refreshing take on racing and wider themes involved in breeding, betting and the unique fascination of small track culture.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timeless.